Is any sin greater, in the parishes of literary fiction, than sentimentality? Novelists pride themselves on using artifice to get at the truth, but sentimentality is all falseness, emotion over-boiled by grandiosity of expression and served up rank and limp. “Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel,” James Baldwin wrote in his essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” blasting “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” “The wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart.” To engineer synthetic emotions for cheap effect is bad enough; even worse, Baldwin says, is the sentimentalist who believes her own schlock, confusing the imitation of emotion for emotion itself.
And yet life is full of excessive emotions and mawkish situations. We know them to be real: how to describe them without seeming fake? It’s a question that preoccupies Alison, the middle-aged narrator of Mary Gaitskill’s “Veronica” (2005), one of the great American novels of the past decade. In the late eighties, working as a typist at a New York ad agency, Alison was befriended by the title character, a fellow-temp sixteen years her senior. The job lay at the bottom of a steep fall from grace: as a teen-ager, Alison had been plucked from the streets of San Francisco and deposited at the center of Paris’s modelling scene, kept in an apartment with an endless supply of marzipan and cocaine until the man doing the keeping grew bored with her. Veronica, by contrast, was a frump of “buzzing ugliness,” who lived in a dingy one-bedroom with six Siamese cats.
“So many of Veronica’s stories were coarse and sentimental,” Alison remembers. Veronica told her about being raped by a man who broke into her New York apartment. She had persuaded him not to kill her by invoking the misery her death would bring her parents:
Veronica has a surfeit of experience and feeling, and, if she seems pathetic in the way that she grasps for connection with the person least likely to offer it, that hint of sentimentality is offset by the fierce majesty of her refusal to suppress it—though it takes a certain keenness of perception to see it that way. “Imagine ten pictures of this conversation,” Alison says. She is thinking of a discussion with Veronica about modelling, and her friend’s declaration that losing her own looks has freed her from the obligation to please anyone but herself. “In nine of them, she’s the fool, and I’m the person who has something. But in the tenth, I’m the fool and it’s her show now. And for just a second, that’s the picture I saw.”
By reputation, Mary Gaitskill is a writer not only immune to sentiment but actively engaged in deep, witchy communion with the perverse. That caricature is in large measure due to the notoriety of her first book, “Bad Behavior,” a collection of short stories that appeared in 1988, when Gaitskill was thirty-three. The cover features a grainy photograph of a ponytailed woman on her knees, pressing her forearms yogically to the floor while holding her naked ankles up in an invitation to be bound. Among its characters are a young suburban secretary (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal in the movie adaptation) who allows her lawyer boss to spank her in his office; a girl who steals away for a weekend of sadomasochism with a married man; and a Dexedrine addict who amuses himself in lovelorn pursuit of his colleague at a secondhand bookstore on the Lower East Side. The shock of these scenarios has faded in the course of nearly thirty years (the cover image, in the age of American Apparel, seems sweetly decorous), and what stands out now is not so much the squalidness of the sex as Gaitskill’s wisdom about what often gets in the way of sex—the tendency of the soul to interrupt the body’s urges with its own demands for recognition.
Beth, the protagonist of “A Romantic Weekend,” the story about the S & M getaway, has assured her new lover that she is an eager masochist, but, as she nervously waits for him on a street corner, a “paroxysm of fantasy” overtakes her. She imagines swooning in his arms like some gauzy thirties film starlet, propped up on a blue powder puff and surrounded by thornless roses as he tells her he loves her. Beth recognizes the insuperable sentimentality of her vision, which does little to stop it from conquering her imagination, flooding the hard, dry place where pain should go. The weekend is a disaster. Her lover, a spiteful sadist devoted to what he had thought to be their mutual project of Beth’s humiliation, is bewildered by “her willful, masculine, stupid somethingness,” her annoying refusal to be beaten or burned. Beth is bewildered, too; despite herself, she has turned into a person neither submissive nor dominant but an unstable compound of the two.
No writer is sharper about the fickle exigencies of desire. Dominance and submission—the shifting poles that govern all relationships, not just sexual ones—are Gaitskill’s great subjects, carrying her from “Bad Behavior” to her novels “Two Girls, Fat and Thin” (1991) and “Veronica,” and through two more story collections, “Because They Wanted To” (1997) and “Don’t Cry” (2009). Friends are susceptible to the subtle struggle for appreciation and control just as much as lovers are; children who seek safety in the pillar of their parents’ authority when they are young grow up to test it against their own force of will, even at the risk of crushing themselves under its weight.
One such child is Velveteen Vargas, called Velvet, who appears in Gaitskill’s new novel, “The Mare” (Pantheon). When the book opens, Velvet is eleven. She has recently moved from Williamsburg to Crown Heights with her six-year-old brother, Dante, and their mother, Silvia, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who speaks no English and cannot read or write. It’s almost summer; Silvia is nervous about the new neighborhood, black rather than Spanish, and suspicious of what Velvet might get up to now that school is out. “Because I was stupid she couldn’t trust me to stay inside and not go around the block talking to men,” Velvet hears her tell a social worker. She knows that the message is meant for her ears; Silvia, affectionately protective of her young son, treats her daughter with a reflexive, mocking harshness that invades Velvet’s mind like some choking weed: “You’re no good, said some words in my head. It’s not your fault, it’s your blood that’s bad.”
The solution is two weeks upstate with the Fresh Air Fund—an unpromising escape, to judge by the pair of white chaperones Velvet overhears at the Port Authority on the morning of her departure, congratulating themselves on their charity in poisonously smug terms. “They come up and they see this big house and all these nice things, and they want to know, How do you get all this?” one woman tells the other. “And I say to them, We get it with hard work.” But the couple waiting for Velvet displays no symptoms of a noble-savior complex. Paul and Ginger live modestly in faculty housing at the college where Paul teaches, next door to a small horse barn where Ginger offers to take Velvet for lessons. Paul has a daughter from his first marriage, while Ginger, nearly a decade younger, at forty-seven, has no children or career of her own. Before meeting Paul, in A.A., she lived in downtown Manhattan, an unsuccessful painter embroiled in a series of brutal relationships. Her mother and her sister have both recently died. She thinks that fostering a child might give her a sense of what it would be like to adopt, to inhabit the adulthood she has long delayed; her first glimpse of Velvet ripples with a new mother’s immediate tenderness. “She smiled like she was seeing heaven,” Velvet observes, a little skeptically.
A white woman who yearns to nurture her way to redemption; a Latina girl who needs shelter from poverty and abuse—the premise bristles with the peril of sentimentality, as Ginger knows. “I felt excited and scared about how to act—I couldn’t even respond properly to my own family, so how could I take care of a needy child from another culture? It was a cliché to think that way, but I could feel her difference,” she thinks. On the obverse side of the cliché, though, leans a formulaic posture of dismissal that blocks the possibility of any truer response. Gaitskill observes the way that Ginger’s acquaintances squirm and scoff as her relationship with Velvet deepens, first during the Fresh Air Fund weeks, and then in a series of regular phone calls and visits that extend over three years. “Sounds like an easy way to play at being a parent, ” Becca, Paul’s imperious first wife, tells her. At an A.A. meeting, a friend from her derelict Manhattan days “put on her program face and said, ‘It sounds like you’re really wanting to nurture yourself. I think you need to be looking at your own shit.’” Even Paul accuses her of slipping into the part of “white benefactor.”
The idea that Ginger sees Velvet as a way to flatter her own vanity is simpler to grasp than the notion that she might be moved by a love as profound and intractable, in its way, as a real mother’s. Paul senses the “whiff of addiction” in Ginger’s devotion to Velvet, and it’s true that there’s an unsettling neediness both to the urgency of her love and to her wish to prove herself adequate at loving. In nine out of ten pictures, she’s as the others think she is: a well-intentioned fool playing at being a parent to someone else’s kid. But in the tenth she’s as she knows herself to be—a woman who loves a child with all the confusion and ferocity that such love entails. That’s the picture that Gaitskill projects, illuminating Ginger, lantern-like, from within the space of her own mind.
Gaitskill, too, had a rough and damaged youth. She, too, moved to upstate New York; she got married in her forties to a writer who became a professor, and has fostered children from the Fresh Air Fund. But she keeps clear of the self-justifying temptations of fiction embedded with memoir by structuring “The Mare” as a series of short chapters delivered in the first person, slicing deftly among her characters’ various points of view. Paul and Silvia have a say, but the leading roles are Ginger’s and Velvet’s—a risky strategy, since it requires a kid’s voice that can match an adult’s in lifelike tone and psychological depth. Velvet, fortunately, is that most wonderful of fictional creations: a convincing child who manages to be a captivating and perceptive narrator. Here she is at eleven, overhearing an argument between Ginger and Paul that she senses involves her: “It felt like at the bus station, only harder to understand. Like I was in the Alice in Wonderful story where she is really, really tiny and then really, really big, like I was something tiny in their house and huge at the same time.” And here she is at twelve after running into her crush at a party in Bushwick, her inner register expanded and sharpened to reflect the change from childhood to adolescence:
This is language powerfully expressive in its intuition. Gaitskill shows Velvet coming up with new words and phrases to put to new feelings, hitting on formulations (“tight and hot”; “breathing in life”) that are believable both for the fresh simplicity of their diction and for the electric sophistication of the observations that they convey.
“The Mare” is indebted, in its narrative strategy, to “As I Lay Dying,” another novel that employs a host of recurring narrators to get at the tangled intricacies of family life. There is a certain loom-like effect at work in both books, a warp-and-woof texture, visible only to the reader, produced by the interwoven sets of impressions. When Velvet first arrives upstate, Ginger’s excitement is balanced by Velvet’s wariness that Ginger “was smiling like she knew me and she did not.” Before long, she begins to trust Ginger, and although Ginger senses the shift, she can’t see, as we can, the precise moment it occurs (when she shows up at the barn to watch Velvet at a riding lesson), or how Velvet phrases it to herself: “Just all of a sudden, it made sense, her being there, me being with her. I don’t know why. But I got it. It was like I was looking at puzzle pieces all over the floor that magically got snapped into place and I went, Oh, okay.”
This is how intimacy between two people is formed: in fits and starts, and at different speeds. And this is how it continues, private worlds approaching and receding from one another in unpredictable orbits. As Velvet’s relationship with Ginger deepens, she starts to look for its seams. “Velvet knew all about weakness and power, and it felt like she was pressing on my weak spot, just to see what would happen,” Ginger thinks, after Velvet has asked her about a woman she’s seen with Paul, sensing, before Ginger does, that something is amiss. “She didn’t push it; she didn’t have to. She was just letting me know she saw it. And that she was curious about it.”
And so we are back in familiar Gaitskill territory, watching the cunning dance of dominance and submission unfold. Velvet’s challenges to Ginger stem, in part, from the adolescent instinct to test the true force of the adult authority that she depends on to protect her, and she is reassured to find it responsive and intact; there can be a great relief in not getting away with things. But she also wants to show Ginger where the limits of her power lie, to let her know that for all her nurturance—the phone calls to her teachers to check on her progress, the encouragement and emotional support—she isn’t her mother. “I felt like saying to Ginger, See, we laugh,” Velvet thinks, during a rare moment of domestic peace in Brooklyn. Silvia’s authority is a matter of brute force: she pummels Velvet for sneaking out of the house at night, for taking bread before dinner is served, for talking back, or, on one terrible occasion, for gazing in open pleasure at musicians on a subway platform, punishing her for exactly the quality that Ginger most prizes: “You stupid girl, you give everything away! In front of people!” Silvia knows the cost of female weakness in her world, and her pedagogy is accordingly cruel. To make Ginger feel her authority, Velvet hardens herself. She threatens Silvia by seeming soft.
In the classic novel of adoption, the protagonist’s origins are dispensed with or obscured. Heathcliff is discovered parentless on the streets of Liverpool; Oliver Twist is orphaned from infancy. Without parental interference, the hero is free, for better or worse, to form himself. Velvet is presented with two opposite parental models, neither entirely viable, and, as she struggles to negotiate between them, Ginger and Silvia compete for influence, sussing each other out. “She sat in her body like it was a tank,” Ginger thinks when she meets Silvia. Silvia’s appraisal of Ginger: “She lives in the sky. She’s nice like a little girl is nice.”
Their greatest power struggle takes place around the question of horses. As soon as Velvet begins to take riding lessons, it’s clear that she’s a natural equestrian. Silvia is sure that she’ll fall and kill herself, and refuses to grant permission for her to ride; Ginger, delighting in Velvet’s skill and the transformative potential of her obvious excellence, secretly overrules her.
Velvet is drawn, in particular, to a mare with the unfortunate name of Fugly Girl, so called because of her scarred face and skittish, aggressive nature, marks of an earlier life of abuse. Velvet has been given her name for a reason, too—“The Mare” bears an epigraph from “National Velvet,” the story of a fourteen-year-old rider who triumphs at the Grand National Steeplechase—and the tough girl, unsurprisingly, turns out to have a way with the tough beast. “You control them from inside their heads,” Beverly, one of Velvet’s riding instructors, tells her. “The physical is backup. Mostly.” Later, she expands on the thought: “You make a horse great by making it feel like shit. Because it knows it is not shit and it will turn itself inside out to prove it to you.”
But Velvet has no interest in Beverly’s methods. She has an intuitive sense for horses from the moment she first enters the barn, interpreting their “talking” noises as easily as human speech. As soon as she begins to learn how to ride, that intuition becomes corporal, and one of the great pleasures of Gaitskill’s novel is reading about the power of the female body in ecstatic communion with another animal: “We warmed up, walk, trot, canter, and even though we were going in different directions and not following nobody, it was like we were together at the stomach. . . . I could feel her happiness like I can smell perfume.” This is domination of the right kind: one animal showing another the right way to move.
The temptation of other worlds pulses through each of Gaitskill’s novels. In “Veronica,” Alison throws herself into the European modelling scene to break with the stultifying normalcy of her suburban family life. Dorothy, one of the heroines of “Two Girls, Fat and Thin,” assaulted by her father as a teen-ager, latches onto the dime-store objectivist philosophy shilled by an Ayn Rand-like figure and flees her parents’ home to join the movement. Both worlds turn out to be disastrously superficial, beautiful bubbles made to burst. Velvet’s life upstate is a genuine refuge, but it doesn’t come free from isolating cost. If Ginger’s house isn’t quite home, neither, anymore, is Silvia’s, and Fugly Girl is a further degree removed from either reality. “Being on the mare happened on another planet, someplace beautiful but with outer space all around it,” Velvet thinks. “I couldn’t even tell it to anybody. I was locked away from everybody. I couldn’t even beat on the door because there was no door.” It’s a terribly lonely feeling; a liberating one, too. On horseback, Velvet is in her own, untouchable place, and Gaitskill’s sentences lift their necks and pick up speed to match her movements stride for stride:
